RememberItNow

Simple to use. Provides e-mail and SMS reminders. Lets you graph important medical stats. Provides a daily health journal. Lets you easily share information and collaborate with other caregivers.

Cons
Crashes often in Firefox and Chrome. Lacking in features compared to competing services. High monthly fee. No drug interaction field in Medications section.

Bottom Line

RememberItNow is a personal health management tool that helps simplify day-to-day caregiving regimens. Its reminders and health-tracking tools can come in handy, but you may have to cope with frequent crashes.

Caring for an aging or chronically ill relative is hard enough without tracking doctors' appointments, juggling prescriptions, or remembering when your loved one is supposed to take what medicine. RememberItNow simplifies this daily care regimen by giving you e-mail and SMS reminders, a way to track overall well-being, a health journal, and more. This service is much sleeker and easier to use than its most famous competitors, Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health. It's geared more toward staying on top of day-to-day patient care than serving as a filing cabinet for health history, and thus isn't as overloaded with features as they are. RememberItNow can be a big helpprovided you can pay the monthly fees, and you're willing to cope with some stability issues.

A one-month trial of RememberItNow is free. After that, the individual plan (supporting only one user) costs $19.99 per month, and the Care Share plan (supporting up to 20 users) runs $23.99 per month. The pricing may seem steep, considering that Google Health and HealthVault are free, but RememberItNow is cheaper than its most similar competitor (in terms of features), Zume Life, which costs $35 per month.

Setting up your account is easy: Just enter information about the patient's allergies and medical conditions. You have fewer options here than with HealthVault or Google Health, both of which track family history, immunizations, past medical procedures, and more. The top navigation bar displays the Dashboard, Contacts, Medications, Calendar, My Stats, Journal, and Resources tabs. Dashboard gives you a quick overview of all the information in the other tabs. Contacts is where you store names and contact information for doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, and so on; you can search through them by keyword and mark important contacts with a star. The Resources tab lets you store links for places like insurance or medical information Web sites. The Calendar shows you your schedule of events (such as appointments) and medications.

Remember your Meds
The Medications section is the bread and butter of the service. You can track of all the patient's medications and schedule reminders for taking them, as well as fill in other important details like dosage, how the medicine should be taken (orally, with food, etc.), what it's for, the doctor that prescribed it, and the pharmacy that filled the prescription. There are no fields dedicated to drug interactions, however, which would be useful.

The Journal tab lets you keep a running health diary of the patient's daily progress, and leave caretaker instructions and updates. Here you can record the patient's overall well-being (on a scale from one to five) and see a chart of these ratings over time. Similarly, the My Stats section lets you keep a running log of blood pressure, blood glucose, and weight measurements, graph them over time, and set and graph goals. If you ever need to share information with medical providers or others not in your Care Share account, you can print out reports for the various sections, or e-mail them.

RememberItNow isn't as feature rich as HealthVault or Google Health. It currently lacks the apps and syncing capabilities that can let you do things like link to your CVS account, get automatic medical record updates, or attach your insurance provider to your account. According to RememberItNow founder Pam Swingley, however, the service plans to include such features in the future.

The software was unstable during my tests, frequently crashing in Firefox and Chrome, but generally working more consistently in Internet Explorer. Hopefully these kinks will be worked out soon, because RememberItNow is a straightforward and helpful way to track and share health information. The service fulfills an important need for people with chronic health issues or caregiversprovided you don't mind spending $24 a month for the service.

Errol Pierre-Louis first came to PCMag as an editorial intern in 2006. After graduating from Georgetown University with a B.A. in English he joined the Software Team as a full-time Reviews Producer. Today he is...

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service